The Long Road Out

Thanks to The Atlantic for this month's " Failed State of America " article by staff writer George Packer. Of course Packer writes what we've all felt, and particularly brings alive the peculiar institution of the executive branch as it's now displayed for the world to gawk at. There will never be enough time, nor ink, to outline the gutless self-interest of Kushner and Trump and the boys and girls who surround them. I can't add much--but I would like to offer a further point of emphasis to this very satisfying description of the United States of America, and how we got from our last dying gasp of decency (9/11) to our current post-mortem, made real by the ambulances rushing to the mass graves. Had Packer asked my editorial advice (he didn't need it and my comments wouldn't improve what he actually wrote!) I might have mentioned not just the executive branch, since we’re all poisoned from that source. I would have summarized the failed st...

Wells Fargo, the bank with all the office space and ugly logo, failed to develop a loan processing system in time to allow any of its small business customers to apply for the Payroll Protection Plan authorized by the Small Business Administration (SBA).  Now, like every other major bank, it's been sued for prioritizing PPP applications to favor the applications with the largest fees (or worse). Double whammy--they didn't get organized in time to participate, and they're still getting sued for doing it wrong. Sympathy for an archaic dinosaur aside, these failures will bankrupt many Wells Fargo customers and result in immediate layoffs that were avoided by customers of many small local banks and other processors. Here's what Wells Fargo has to say about their failure: “We at Wells Fargo screwed up and made things worse for you than they already were. No other financial institution screwed this up as badly as we did, and we grovel with apology.  Because we screwed ...

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense ...

Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, Speak to me in the easy way which you always used Put no difference in your tone, Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household world that it always was, Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It it the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, Just around the corner. All is well.  ―  Henry Scott Holland